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Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

latimes.com

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Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#371

Post by nicky0 »

amelius wrote: post #363
slg wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest flaws of the tech industry is the belief that being a tech expert is enough to disrupt other industries in which they don't have any expertise. Sometimes they get lucky and it works despite something like Uber's or Airbnb's total ignorance of the law. Sometimes it fails like with numerous cryptocurrency companies relearning why the finance industry has so many dang regulations. Seems like Soylent i…

> One of the biggest flaws of the tech industry is the belief that being a tech expert is enough to disrupt other industries in which they don't have any expertise. One of the biggest flaws of consumers is that they can't tell low tech from high tech. Writing a shiny CRUD website is not high tech.

Why should a consumer care either way?

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#372

Post by tempestn »

nurettin wrote: post #224
jdietrich wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it really so difficult to make a sandwich?

It is very easy to make a sandwich once you have a fridge which fills itself with fresh ingredients whenever you run out.

Also your sandwich is predominantly going to be made up of bread, even the healthiest of which isn't all that healthy, and likely deli meat, which you probably don't want to much of either.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#373

Post by vidarh »

cheiVia0 wrote: post #179
benevol wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Processed food is always a bad idea. It's simple, really: The closer your are to nature, the better you feel (because the healthier you are). Our body is happier when we spend our time in nature instead of artificial environment (there are studies on that subject) and we are less cancerous when we eat natural food (as opposed to processed food). Every time we step away from our nature, we sabotage ourselves.

MMM, delicious natural snake venom.

I'm partial to that all-natural cyanide myself.

With a uranium chaser.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#374

Post by therein »

reacweb wrote: post #318
briandear wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AirBnB and Uber are as ignorant of the law as a medicinal marijuana dealer selling in Texas.

IMHO, Uber has accumulated enough years of practice of law circunvention and political lobbying to earn some expertise badges. Maybe they were ignorant, now they are not.

You could say the same thing about a dealer who started dealing in high school, continued dealing, graduated college, and still not caught.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#375

Post by joshumax »

masklinn wrote: post #314
coleifer wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're laying the schadenfreude on a bit thick, don't you think?

Seems to be just the right thickness.

Any thicker and we'd have to start cutting it into bars and marketing it on a shiny over-designed website.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#376

Post by ainiriand »

Isn't the title a bit misleading? I mean, it is not the powder, it is only the bars. And is not like customers keep getting sick because of the powder, it is the case of some customers who got sick because of a bad ingredient in the bars... Opinions?

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#377

Post by nether »

Animats wrote: post #196

Soylent made such a big deal of being a "tech company", and boasted about their overdesigned web infrastructure for a business that did two transactions a minute. What they didn't have is advanced technology on the production side. They write about "sending samples out" to external labs. It's not like they had an automated lab constantly sampling their production line and posting the results to the web. There are pro…

Their main product is their ecommerce tech stack. Soylent is a side project.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#378

Post by DanBC »

deepGem wrote: post #26

Man, this is a bummer. As much as I hate the concept of Soylent as food, I see it as the only way to scale food production for the growing population, without killing our planet. The other options are still in the labs. Artificial tissues for instance. Vertical farming is one alternative, but that is again fraught with massive energy consumption. I hope Soylent gets to solve this.

There are already existing nutritional supplements on the market, used by eg World Food Programme.

https://www.wfp.org/nutrition/special-nutritional-products

But WFP doesn't want to push these as sole sources of nutrition, or even regular components of a diet. These are used in emergencies. A lot of WFP's work is around building resilience into communities to prevent hunger. https://www.wfp.org/preventing-hunger

We currently produce enough food for the entire planet. It's not distributed very well, and there's a lot of waste.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#379

Post by TeMPOraL »

ng12 wrote: post #113
Matachines wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time Soylent is on HN people say this. Why don't people understand? It's so simple: Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need. It's not a) the ONLY food you can eat or b) supposed to replace all meals. I order a box of Soylent bottles every few weeks—they come in handy while working or for a quick breakfast or if I have little time and am hungry. I also cook meals with my girlfriend a few times a week…

> Soylent is for meals you don't care about but need This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore. Something I observed in the weightlifting community: there are people who need to worry about dieting (cutting) and people who worry about eati…

> This is the problem. That concept is completely foreign to a lot of people (me included). The combination of my body's needs and the way I was raised lead me to view each meal as an opportunity to be enjoyed, never a chore.

Different people, different concepts :). I used a Soylent clone in the past to replace breakfast/lunch and I liked it. I feel I might be unique at that among my coworkers, but I e.g. really prefer eating at my desk - I can parallelize it with work, or reading a book, or reading HN, which is infinitely more interesting to me than eating out with most people.

> but I'll never understand that feeling of "ugh, I need to eat, guess I'll have a Soylent".

My mother was on a diet plan once, where they suggested two options for meals each day, and if you really didn't feel like eating that, you could replace it with a protein shake. There were days when that shake really was the best alternative, and it allowed her to stick to the plan instead of giving up.

Re: Soylent halts sales of its powder as customers keep getting sick

#380

Post by TeMPOraL »

NumberCruncher wrote: post #370
TeMPOraL wrote: post #359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With nutrition you can safely assume most things you hear are bullshit.

I do not think so. The statement that keto is the best diet even if it causes rectal bleeding sounds reasonable to me [source: HN]. I go now and take a fat-shake. Cheers!

I was on keto. It worked. No rectal bleeding. I also didn't die of various stuff I was supposed to. I'm close to getting jailed though, because I fear that at some point I'll break and punch the next person who tells me that artificial sweeteners cause cancer.
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